


no history for the wanderers

by uglowian



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy, Mindless Self Indulgence, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: F/F, Future, Girls Kissing, Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 02:32:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15038732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uglowian/pseuds/uglowian
Summary: for no_tags prompt #2:Lindsay Way/Victoria Asher/Nicole Row (or gen centered on them) - starlight"Fatality is like ghosts in snow and you have no idea what you're up againstbecause I've seen what they look like."





	no history for the wanderers

**Author's Note:**

> to the op: this prompt got rowdy. thanks for the excuse to have some fun.
> 
> to everyone: the footnotes don't correctly link to themselves because ao3 is trying to silence the ferocious whispers of my creative soul. in light of this, i recommend opening the fic in two tabs. one for reading the actual body of the text, and the other for just referencing the footnotes at the bottom.
> 
> party party party.

**_  
nebula_ **   


it's raining, the night he takes her in. a few days later, when he leaves her with his flatscreen and a big selection of movies ( _cinematic classics_ , he tells her), she comes to understand that this is somewhat cliche. the rain. the man. the woman.

he's not really a man the way the men are men in the movies.

and she's certainly no woman. or maybe she is. she hadn't stopped to think about it before. this question sets in motion memory and curiosity and introspection all at once, scripts all running in parallel.

[the memory:](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_OLIvGuSulPk/TOTdLtJw3uI/AAAAAAAABgU/vGUlqyM_QwE/s1600/v_pola_1web.jpg)

>   
> he finds her sitting on the grit, back up against the rough of the wall of a place she's never been. it's raining very hard, and it runs off the brim of his hat and the shelf of his shoulders in little streams and catches the glare off nearby lights. she has a small catalogue of items that compare to these things. spun glass. crystalline. mareel. and just the sea, the way it looks when the sun comes up.
> 
> _are you okay?_
> 
> he wants to know.
> 
> it's raining. it keeps raining. is she okay? she blinks at him and understands that her eyes, or the pupils of them, are much bigger and much darker than his. the stormy night fogs up his glasses.
> 
> _are you okay?_
> 
> in the end, he takes her in.
> 
>  _i'm patrick._
> 
> the light in his apartment bathroom is a number of things. small and rattly and caesious1. in the mirror, she beholds a face and a body, both of which she has seen before. her eyes, with pupils much bigger and darker than his. her hair. much longer than his. all of her, taller than him, and younger than him.

  
the curiosity:

there are rules by which all things are classified. architectures that order the universe, a proliferation of north stars. 

clearly. 

how did they come to be? by whose hand? are these arbitrary laws the metric that sets her apart from other people?

these questions trigger a small action in her head that isn't an action but a thing for which 'action'—or perhaps 'chain reaction'—is a necessary metaphor.

  1. Nothing Is Arbitrary
  2. All Rule Is Law
  3. All Law Exists For a Reason



you will never die, someone tells her, in his bathroom and in his living room and in a place she must have been, once, maybe a long time ago. you will see so much more than any of us could have imagined.

this doesn't make sense to her. she files this memory, shaped the way light dances on water, neatly away, imminent, ready for recall. in the mirror, her face looks back at her. in the movies, the man who finds the woman is very tall, his shoulders very broad. the woman is shaped somewhat like her, but with blond hair. maybe this is why she is not like the woman, and maybe the shoulders are why he is not like the man.

in the rain, he walks her home. he asks if she's cold, and she thinks that he must expect her to say yes, or he wouldn't have asked. the rain trickles down the back of her shirt and she knows, by some mechanism that she cannot trace, that she hasn't been cold in a very long time.

maybe this is strange.

the introspection:

forget the rules. _cogito ergo sum._

-

Out on the rooftop landing, in a place once known as Utah, Nicole sprawls on her back and feels all the little stuccoed pinpoints of the flooring prickle at her skin. Beneath her shoulders, the little roadside inn mostly slumbers. At her side, Lindsey points up, picks out a starry constellation, and says _Aquarius_.

Nicole bites her lip. Can't swallow a smile. "Tell me about Aquarius."

It's a very bright night with the full moon and all the stars and no man-made light for miles out in any direction. The moonglow spreads its lambent shapes on Lindsey's cheeks.

Her voice makes Nicole think of lakes the color of quinacridone, clear and deep and phosphorescent. She says: Aquarius resides in the Sea, which Nicole knew, and that Aquarius is a flood, like theirs, and that all floods are just forgettings, and that's how they got here now. All things, once drowned, washed up on the shores of forgetting2.

This last part, Nicole didn't know. This part, Nicole thinks, is kind of bullshit. She says so and Lindsey smiles, bright as sunshine flashing through a windchime.

"Yeah, but it's a good story."

Nicole can't argue with that.

She noses close. Beneath the stellate congregation of the universe, Lindsey laughs and kisses her.

-

his apartment occupies a small geometry, high up in the city, close to the sea. he keeps a tall blue tank, inset into the wall beside the windows—the big bank of windows that spill from ceiling to floor—so he can watch the water. he keeps seahorses in the tank, small and spiny and black and strange.

she asks: "why do you keep the ocean in here?"

outside, the grey sky bows low, sagging down to meet the water. it turns everything a color that she thinks is pretty, the tinted blue that comes through the windows when there's rain on it. she likes that color. he looks at her from where he's sitting at his little electric keyboard.

"what?"

"why do you keep the ocean in here?"

"wh—you mean the fishtank?"

"yes."

he shrugs. he's small, and sweet, and soft, she thinks. if her life were like the old movies of his, she wonders if this would be the part where she falls in love with him. is she supposed to fall in love with him? he doesn't seem to think so.

"i just like the seahorses." he smiles and she wonders what's funny. "it's harder to see them if i just go down to the beach."

she guesses that's true. she spends some time peering at the weird little creatures with their curlicue tails and their spiny bodies. where do you think you're going, she wonders. where do you think you are?

the seahorses bob along, indifferent.

all travelers, going nowhere in particular.

-

"I want to go for a drive," Lindsey said while they both sat out in the crabgrass, before the sun came all the way up. Before it got too hot to sit anywhere except inside.

She and Nicole were young, in the sense that this genesis was, by necessity, an event that preceded all others. A precipitating. They were young, because they existed in a moment before the sun was all the way up, before the car, before the place that used to be Utah. They were younger than they will be, but not so young that Nicole didn't consider this statement. Didn't turn it over in her mind—cars, driving, and endless bigness.

"A drive to where?"

"Nowhere."

"Will we come back?"

"I dunno. Maybe."

The infinite horizon. Nicole thought about it for a while, and about never coming back.

As J.M. Barrie once wrote: _second star to the right and straight on, til morning._

She looked at Lindsey.

"Okay. Let's go."

-

you will never die. lying on her back, she watches lights that are very, very bright. what's all this business about living and dying, she wants to know. why does it matter?

he has no answers. he asks her how she got to the city.

"i walked," she tells him.

"you walked?"

"yes. i just said that."

"from where?"

"i don't know. far away, i guess."

he watches her for a while. he has eyes that she thinks she would have to look at for a long time before she could name their color. his glasses make them look big and owlish. she notices that, today, his pupils are very wide, like hers.

"are you hungry?" he asks. "i'm gonna make dinner."

she hasn't been hungry for days, but she says yes anyway.

while he cooks, the lights come back, bright bright bright, and the face she can't remember tells her: you will never die.

and these words inspire in her the smear of something poorly sketched and a single thought to follow.

[the smear:](http://img.picturequotes.com/2/775/774972/774972.jpg)

> the whole hollow sky came down on them without warning, in spears of light and flakes of turquoise—paint chips, peeled paper, hardened blue crust, but also none of those things.
> 
> no rain, no storm.
> 
> borrowed time, said mccarthy of the eschaton about which he could only prognosticate. borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
> 
> _you will never die._
> 
>   
>  they told her while the shapes of other human bodies went hissing up into the endless place, no more, no more, no more.
> 
> small surgeon's claws found her sternum, her heart, her cerebellum, her cervical spine.
> 
> _you will never die._
> 
>   
>  her eyes are not borrowed, but her pupils were very wide. while the sky came down, while the bodies hissed, she saw bright lights and felt small claws. they gave her all that borrowed time.

  
the single thought: _eyes, not borrowed; sorrow, not borrowed either_.

and when he finishes cooking, she sits very neatly at his table and picks at his food and watches his little seahorses bobbing along, fins going ceaseless in a current known only to them.

"do they like music?" she asks.

"i don't know. they don't seem like they _don't_ like it."

that makes her sad to think about. she helps him do the dishes when the dinner is done. he sits up for several more hours, picking at his keyboard, scribbling in a notebook, occasionally stopping to watch videos, scrolling on a small holoscreen. she watches the seahorses, determined to investigate how they feel about all this noise.

she presses the tips of her fingers to their little glass world.

it is a well known fact that seahorses drew the chariot of poseidon, eons and eons ago3.

the glass cools her fingertips. what do you make of that, little hippocampi?

his music hums in the deltas of her wrists. the seahorses, it would seem, make nothing of any of it.

-

The place that used to be Utah.

This is the story of two girls and the end of the world as we know it, but not as they know it. For them, the sky shattered a very long time ago. They are the star children of another world.

On the stuccoed flooring of that rooftop, Lindsey tells Nicole about Aquarius, and about water, and about all the things that water is, not in the chemical sense, but in its obverse. Water, which pours into human marrow, which becomes the explanation for the fall of kingdoms, which is a metaphor, and an exact measurement, all in one.

"I mean, it's not _really_ a measurement, either," Lindsey adds. "It's just the feeling of the thing, where there'd be a measurement. The curtain of water spilled onto your head until everything gets washed away."

Nicole wonders if that's how it felt when the sky came crashing down.

Here, in the place that used to be Utah, no one has those answers, and she doesn't know what she'd do if they did. She's here to chase the stars, not the past.

_Let's go for a drive,_ Lindsey said.

To nowhere, but always with a plan in mind. Star children indeed—or starchasters, or just amateur astronomers, looking for nothing except magic. Why bother with anything else?

Up above them, the night sprays stars everywhere, and Nicole dragged along a camera, just for this reason. She kisses Lindsey, she picks up her little shuttered bit of magic, and tips it high, and, in one irisated snap, captures a light that took, at minimum, 4.37 years4 to get to her.

_A drive to where?_

Second star to the right.

**_  
protostar  
_ **

he has a man who comes to visit him. a man he loves, she surmises. this man's name is mikey, and his presence gives lie to the old movies with the man in the rain and the woman and the part where they eventually fall into each other's arms.

"how'd you get to the city?" mikey asks.

"i walked."

"from?"

"i don't know. i just walked. he already asked me this question."

mikey has pupils almost as wide as hers. they contract sometimes, like now, when he looks at patrick like he thinks something's funny. patrick shrugs.

"i did already ask her."

mikey, who has a bowl of cereal in his hands, eats and sucks his spoon in patrick's direction. patrick ignores him, flicking through something on the transparent shimmer of his holoscreen. outside, the city's seething neon turns the grey day garish technicolor. later in the day, mikey asks her if, _on the subject of walks_ , she wants to walk with him and patrick, down by the water.

she goes.

the sea makes a very big noise when they're close to it and as they walk, the sky splits open. rain comes down in dreary streams.

"does it bother you?" patrick asks.

"the rain? it never bothers me."

mikey, with glasses fogged, glances at patrick again, this time less like he thinks something is funny.

"yeah," he agrees. "it never bothers us either."

there's something to be said here, she thinks, but she doesn't know what it is. they keep walking. the sand makes sucking sounds to mark their passage.

"people used to use the sky to navigate." mikey squints up into the silent storm. "you know. before everything went to hell."

she knew this, but it's still strange to think about. a sky so full of stars, people made maps of them.

but then a voice tells her: you will never die—and she [remembers](https://image.pollstar.com/WeblogFiles/pollstar/0811090530505576010_6709_v1.jpg) sitting in crabgrass, picking out constellations with patrick at her side.

"i remember when the sky fell," she says, blowing rainwater off her lips.

this time, patrick glances at mikey. mikey tips his face up to the rain, again. eyes closed.

patrick says: "yeah. we remember, too."

-

They leave the little place in not-Utah, and come upon a gas station, two nights later. Nicole buys them things that were once all-American. Coke and chips, and bottles of water because Lindsey said so.

In the green swaths of country between a big desert and a bigger river, Nicole picks up her camera at nighttime. She sits on the hood of Lindsey's car and takes pictures of the fireflies5 that look like a carpet of stars spread out in a skin three feet above the earth. They blink their fragile songs to one another.

"Let me see," says Lindsey, reaching for the camera. So Nicole shows her.

The pictures look like the lakes of heaven. Those are, naturally, not a real thing, but the fireflies promise they can chase the idea of them anyway.

Nicole sprawls on her back, points her toes up to the sky, and it doesn't cross her mind to wonder what the sky was like before it broke itself. She is here, she is vincible, and on the shelf of an ended eon, that's all that matters.

Where are you going, little girls?

Away from daybreak.

She takes another picture, this time of the way her feet make black islands against the congregation of heaven.

"What're you doing?" Lindsey asks her.

Nicole gives her the camera again. She watches her flip through the pictures on the little digital screen. She knows, the way a ghost knows things, by the stitching together of old feelings, that Lindsey's mouth is still salty from the potato chips.

She answers: "Remembering."

And Lindsey laughs and calls her a tortured soul.

-

_Geist_ , says the same voice that tells her she will never die—and this part she remembers, or remembers better, because she recalls it without warning, just like that.

> [ piece by piece, the sky came down, terrific in its enormity.](https://78.media.tumblr.com/61ac604a1bb16965b33cea14e7d02873/tumblr_p842lnRs2I1r5gn1to1_1280.png)
> 
> she remembers being underground. she remembers that they were all underground, that they, with the crust of earth between them and the great crush of heaven, were as safe as they could possibly be.  
> all the bright lights.  
> 
> 
> _you will see so much more than any of us could have imagined._
> 
>   
>  this was true, and it is still true, and she wondered, then, how this voice—this man—was so sure that there'd be anything left to see at all.
> 
>  _all time, all history, moves us forward, whether we wish to be moved or not. be a brave girl. don't cry._
> 
>   
>  she wasn't crying. she watched all the bright lights. she thought of poetry that went:
> 
>  _Fatality is like ghosts in snow and you have no idea what you're up against  
>  because I've seen what they look like._
> 
>   
> and out of the lights, she heard [patrick's](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR3R4a0Y57rNmYFIfuFiOpsgGYqDgssSvQbg9YDOOYhWpSJgcux) voice, broken like the towers that never did reach heaven. she heard his voice saying and saying _victoria_ and she can't remember what she answered, or if she answered anything at all.  
> 
> 
>  _you will see so much more than any of us could have imagined._
> 
>   
>  not a ghost, but geist. all history moves us forward.

  
she looked for patrick in all those bright lights. and down, down, down thundered the sky. she didn't cry, but the surgeon's little claws did come for her, and the world before the deluge went up like mist murdered in the morning light.

in patrick's little apartment, she watches how his shoulders move as he finds a song on the length of his keyboard. she listens for how mikey, in the kitchen, moves glassware around in starbright sounds that shiver over top patrick's music.

the sky fell—or, as mikey puts it, _everything went to shit_ —so very very long ago. a story on the other side of too many horizons.

"patrick," she says.

his music seethes into silence.

"yeah?"

"do you remember me?"

"yeah."

"for this whole time?"

"no—not all the way. you just looked familiar at first."

"oh."

"why?"

"i remember you."

"really?"

"yeah."

"since we met?"

"no. just now."

he twists to look at her. he's a little bit older than her, but not by much. he's still young. like her, he will be young forever. he says:

"yeah. i was wondering if you'd get there."

in the kitchen, mikey slips the last of whatever unseen glassware away. objects, when they touch, sound like the music in the sky, which doesn't sound like anything, except for the whispers it calls up in the deep, dark trenches of a human chest.

"you always feed me," she remarks, thinking of their dinners, and the food she eats even though her body rarely craves it. "do you get hungry?"

"like, once every few months."

"so why make food all the time?"

"i dunno. we're here, aren't we? might as well eat."

she thinks about how she got here, and how she walked for a very long time before that—for so long, she can't remember where she started. she got hungry once in a while out there, on roads that stretched out into eternity. it interrupted the boredom, that hunger. and so she found little towns, and sat down in little diners, and people, understanding what she was, fed her without expecting anything in exchange. she left them little bits anyway; old jewelry she'd found, usually. the food tasted good.

might as well eat indeed.

mikey appears at the threshold of the little kitchen doorway. patrick looks at him.

later that night, they go to patrick's bedroom together and she sits up on the little couch, watching patrick's old old movies. she hears them making sex noises anyway. they no longer bother her, these noises. maybe they never bothered her in the first place.

she flips the movie off, wraps a blanket around herself, and goes back to look at the seahorses. it's dim out here in the sitting room. the little light in their tank makes their world luminous; a hissing, caustic, gelid glow. they move through their effulgent universe, blind to her, deaf to the sex.

in time, one of the seahorses navigates all the way to the edge of the tank, bumps up against the glass, and turns around. the limits of a world.

to sum up charles taylor: a limit experience is anything that breaks up what once seemed true of the world— _"ordinary reality is 'abolished' and something terrifyingly other shines through…"_

mikey and patrick's sex gives way to silence, which itself isn't quite silent. the sitting room vibrates with the echoes of want. want sated, want unfulfilled—want for what, exactly?

she thinks of all that walking, and a sky, bereft of stars. she thinks of glass curtains binding her heart. she thinks of mikey and of patrick, and the thin space between their mouths.

geist, _in extremis_.

the little seahorses carry on and she rests her forehead against the cool glass of their lurid tank and, hugging her blanket tight around herself, she cries.

-

It's not really a story about the stars—that much must be obvious.

Or, it is a story about the stars, but it's not just about the stars. It's about two girls and the big sky and the way magic comes back into the world when the sun's gone. It's about a moon so bright that the whole nightscape comes alive, like something in a fairytale. In the end, it's about how the two girls go on chasing twilight together, in the nowhere sprawl, fifty years after the end of the world.

Whether they did this or not doesn't really matter. It's a good story, ruptured, even as it is, by the sudden onset of memory. Call it wish-fulfillment if you need to.

At the end of it:

Nicole takes a picture of Lindsey while they're kicking around in a parking lot. Where there aren't any lights except the sky itself; where a spiral galaxy lifts itself up from the distant edge of the earth. A spray of snow. A regal mantle. The cold, white radiance that bursts from Lindsey's back in starry ribbons against the night. The picture freezes this divinity into the shape of her laugh and the fall of her hair.

Nicole will keep this picture forever.

Mouths sticky with the taste of candy, they climb back into the car.

"Where to?" Lindsey grins, hands on the steering wheel.

Nicole watches the sky that doesn't look like the sky before the cataclysm and she chews on a string of licorice and she says:

"Everywhere."

-

memory comes crashing down the same way the sky shattered. she tells patrick.

the underground bunker, and the stitching in her brain, and the breaking open and the putting back together again. _don't cry._

don't weep. don't wonder.

live and wander. the ark, our ark and our covenant, carrying someone else's hope forward.

"you were there with me," she says softly.

"yeah. i remember."

"what did they do to us?"

"i don't know. i mean—i know. i don't know _how_."

she nods. her eyes burn. she wipes at her tears. "mikey was there too."

"yeah, i forgot that for, like. a long time. until i saw him again, i guess."

"so many people died."

"i know."

she pulls her knees up, folds her whole body onto the couch. she presses her face to her legs. when she cries, patrick gets his arm around her, tugs her close. so many people died, and the ones left, the ones not like her, or patrick, or mikey, got up, wept, and staggered on until they expired. patrick doesn't let her go.

"it was a long time ago," he says, but he doesn't sound like he thinks it matters.

she cries into his shoulder until she's wrung out. when she looks at him again, his pupils are a little bit wider than they were before. he blinks once. they contract.

"you get used to it," he says.

"get used to what?"

"i don't know. remembering, or not remembering, or. all the rest. whatever. you just do."

she wipes at her eyes again.

much later, she goes back to the mirror. she peers at her reflection and understands why it won't ever change.

you will never die.

you will see so much more.

you will not want, you will not wonder.

you are our covenant.

eons ago, the sky fell in, and when she left the underground, she looked up and saw the stars and, stripped of anything resembling memory, she thought _how did i get here?_

maybe everyone feels that way, eternal life or no.

**_  
main sequence 6  
_ **

6no more footnotes. she [remembers](http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/24600000/Lyn-z-way-lindsey-E2-80-98lyn-z-E2-80-99-ballato-24631974-500-500.jpg). she [remembers.](https://78.media.tumblr.com/b4d7b9b3ceef3761ef5192f11db40bc6/tumblr_inline_pahkr2F7lU1umo0gc_540.png) she sits by patrick's big windows, she looks out over the city, and she remembers girls who didn't chase stars, but who made music, which is kind of the same thing.

maybe.

(she made music too, because she is [me](https://78.media.tumblr.com/abc5e9de99ef2a44a321b402f2a03ea7/tumblr_owukydGl431wqaiiko1_540.png) but that was a long time ago, and all those things that made me then are gone. and anyway, it's weird to talk about yourself in the first person. 'she' it is. you'll forgive her.)

mikey comes back again when nighttime falls, and for once, it isn't grey or raining. it's been a long time since she's seen the stars. stars take a long time to visit us.

at her back, mikey talks, and patrick listens. mikey has an accent from a place that doesn't exist. (so said a man whose name she now remembers: _oh how wrong we were to think that immortality meant never dying._ ) the two of them go about cooking a dinner that none of them need, but they may as well eat.

the city wears a veil of man-made stars. this high up, she can pick out landbound constellations. this one: a crab. that one: a river. that over there: stars defining the soft space that patrick must make in the moment before his mouth meets mikey's.

she traces that little lake of dark with her fingertips.

why all these stories, then? why the girls, and the car? why _she_? why the stars?

it is the truth that _ghost_ derives from a mangled confluence of languages. _gást_ to mean 'breath', cognate to _geist_ (to mean both 'mind' and 'breath'), both children of dead root words defined simply as: "to rage."

you will not want. you will not wonder. all rule is law.

how stupid.

she flattens her hand against the glass and feels the cold like a globe against her palm. understand this: _cogito ergo sum_ pales in comparison to _i am, therefore i want_.

***

1\. cold light: light accompanied by little or no heat; light produced without incandescence. this phenomenon is not to be confused with stars. see also: luciola cruciata, neon, luciferase, _ghosts_

 

2\. the Sea, otherwise known as the Water, is an area of the sky in which many water-related, and few land-related, constellations occur, and contains also the constellation Eridanus, which is, itself home to a [supervoid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_\(astronomy\)). see also: _lethe_.

 

3\. it is not a well known fact. it is the case, however, that poseidon's terrific sea beasts, horses with fish-tails, were called _hippocampi_ , or, _hippocampus_ in the singular, which is, in turn, the name given to the structure of the brain involved in both memory consolidation and spatial navigation. these are a set of truths. make of them what you will.

 

4\. astroarcheology: a form of navigation; the mechanism by which we travel back through time; the reversing of boltzmann's irrevocable arrow. an undertaking in something gentle, by which we hope ghosts, in the shape of light, might guide us to a meeting place where we can greet what is long gone but looked up at the great, inverted lake of the universe, and stirred wonder in their hearts, in a manner not so different to our own. 

 

5\. pause for one moment on reticulate shifting of adjacent objects. the night sky, flooded as it is with little pinpricks that draw the eye, is not so different to the glimmer of a city in the valley at nighttime. light takes on a blurred semiotics—life (spiritus, pneuma), hope, biology, atomic truth, comfort (fire), and death (also fire, _hitodama_ ). ask then: what becomes of adjacent objects when the sky collapses?

anne carson wrote: _what departs the body upon death is the smallest of fires. when you are alone, in the quiet shift from twilight to full dark, you'll find these tiny stars. say your goodbyes to what you knew, is what they seem to tell you. say goodbye, and let your kisses take the shape of quiet little smokes of light._


End file.
